During times of communications network congestion, subscribers using more than their fair share of bandwidth can impact the quality of experience (QoE) of all active subscribers. In addition, certain applications may unnecessarily consume a large portion of bandwidth during times of congestion, thereby impacting the responsiveness and QoE for more interactive applications. These problems may exist even where traffic and policy management (TPM) systems have been deployed.
Provisioning of deep packet inspection (DPI)-enabled traffic management policies to address data network congestion is often an imprecise, iterative science: policies are statically provisioned, results are observed, conclusions drawn regarding the need for further policy changes, and the cycle may then begin again. When congestion occurs despite enforcement of policies currently in place, manual provisioning of policy changes may be required; but this often occurs after the congestion has passed or, at best, with some delay in response to an alarm being raised. Sometimes it is the reoccurring pattern of network congestion that predicates manual provisioning changes, but the network operations staff must first recognize the pattern and assess what changes are needed.
Accordingly, there is a continuing need for improving systems and methods for congestion management in communications networks.